Reviewed by Reese Kwon
7.5.07

The O. Henry Prize Stories collections, which cull twenty short stories from thousands published in various literary magazines in the United States and Canada, annually provide a bellwether of the kinds of tales that are being written today. Many of the stories in this year’s collection seem to reflect troubled and uncertain times. Story after story explores death, violence, corruption, loneliness and—perhaps most significantly—lies. “The Gift of Years” by Vu Tran is a remarkable story about a Vietnamese war veteran who suspects that his youngest daughter has murdered her husband. He tries to understand what he missed, and what he did and failed to do, during all those years of her childhood during which he had to be away, fighting. As a child, his daughter, with “the vigilance of a priest,” asks questions as forthright as “How many people have you killed, Father?” and “How did you kill them, Father?” He cannot answer her. And so, years later, when he is the one with the questions, he does not ask her for explanations, but instead silently decides that “if what he thought was, in fact, true, he would forgive her— it would remain their secret.” They are united in their evasions.

“The Room,” by the dependably masterful William Trevor, is also a story about the damage wreaked by the inability to utter truths. There is an enormous lie in the shared past of Katherine and her husband, Phair, and a terrible event that they never really discussed. Nine years later, their ability to converse, to truly speak to each other, is badly compromised. Walking home one afternoon, Katherine imagines having dinner with her husband: “She would look across the table at the husband she loved and see a shadow there. They would speak of little things.” She remembers that “there’d been no asking to be told, no asking for promises that the truth was what she heard.” Before Katherine can free herself, she has to realize that most treacherous of all is to lie to herself.

Many more women lie to themselves in Andrew Foster Altschul’s “A New Kind of Gravity.” The story takes place at a battered women’s shelter. Abused women come in, receive help, return to their repentant husbands, come back to the shelter, and so on. The Korean shop on the corner, wryly notes Charlie, the narrator, does a “hell of a business” in red roses. He acknowledges that there is truth in what the caseworkers say, that many of these women have few other options for themselves, or for their kids. Okay, he says, but “it’s the smile” that really gets him, “the way they throw open that door and fall into their husbands’ arms.” For these women, misplaced hope is the most dangerous of sentiments. But the story is really about our narrator Charlie, who works as a guard at the center, and about the temptations that he faces. “No one can take care of them but themselves,” his supervisor tells him, and but he is unwilling to accept this and other truths. Altschul’s story (also selected for last year’s Best New American Voices series) is wise in the ways of the heart, and heartfelt.

There are seventeen other prizewinning stories. Many can be described as “heartfelt,” including a story about a man who develops a disabling speech disorder, two coming-out stories, stories about lonely women and lonely men, and a deliciously disturbing ghost story. It is noteworthy that irony is largely absent from this year’s collection of O. Henry stories. There is comedy and laughter and even a great deal of joy, but irony, at least for the year, seems to have gone on something of a hiatus. Over the selection of stories, there presides a gravitas and a seriousness of intent, an interest in questions of morality.

Why this is so probably has as much to do with the tastes of the series editor and the prize jury as with the zeitgeist; that said, in a world in which people blow up other people in the perverted name of truth, perhaps there is a greater interest in what truth is, and what terrible consequences untruths can have. One might say that in the current moral climate, old and unfashionable questions of right and wrong have taken on an urgent significance. However, to quote another purported book of truth, “the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun”; irony, undoubtedly, for good or ill, will return. Lorrie Moore once wrote that the novel is a job, and the short story a flower. If this is true, then these admirable stories blossom in today’s troubled soil.